Scheduled System/Network Maintenance

• Every Tuesday, between 10:00-11:00 p.m., F&O IT may conduct announced system and application maintenance that may result in the reboot or downtime of servers, desktop computers, laptops and business applications.
• On the 1st Tuesday of each month, between 10:00 p.m. and 2:00 a.m., F&O IT may conduct announced system and application maintenance that may result in the reboot or downtime of servers, desktop computers, laptops and business applications.
• Every Sunday, between 6:00 a.m. and 10:00 a.m., F&O IT may conduct announced system and application maintenance related directly to the UNC One Card system server infrastructure. This time frame offers the least impact to customers since most point of sale locations and libraries are closed.
• This maintenance procedure Includes all F&O IT managed servers, desktop computers and laptops.
• This procedure excludes ITS managed servers, which are on a separate maintenance schedule.
• This procedure is in addition to the normal monthly Microsoft patch cycle which is on or about the 2nd week of each month.
• All system maintenance activity resulting in downtime will be communicated to the appropriate application and system owners 24 hours in advance. Broad-impact maintenance activity will be more widely communicated to F&O via larger scope mailing lists or other means. If the maintenance activity will interfere with your work, you may send a help request to ask for the maintenance to be rescheduled or adjusted.
• Why Tuesday evening? A day and time during the normal business work week is needed to allow multiple F&O IT personnel to be available during critical server and application updates. Tuesday is early enough in the week to allow troubleshooting throughout the rest of the week when needed. Evening hours allow us to perform required maintenance tasks with the least impact to our customers.
• Why every Tuesday evening? Although every Tuesday is scheduled, maintenance will usually not occur that frequently. The frequency of the schedule is simply easier for everyone to remember. The longer maintenance window on the 1st Tuesday of each month allows for more in-depth work to be performed.

Exceptions

• F&O IT reserves the right to make an exception to the maintenance window procedure in the event of an issue of urgent nature that threatens the stability of one or more critical systems or business applications. This includes but is not limited to urgent security patches and system reboots or reconfigurations. Out-of-band work may result in system downtime and applications being unavailable.

• University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Policy on Information Security
• University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Standard on Information Technology Change Management

Primary Contact

F&O IT Critical Systems and Applications Team

Alan Forrest
Systems Programmer/Specialist
alan@unc.edu919-843-6839